Software and non-software systems such as business processes and organizational structures may be modeled using currently available modeling languages. There are numerous general-purpose modeling languages that include a graphical notation to create an abstract model of the systems. The models may be serialized using markup languages such as the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), or the like.
The abstract model may be viewed graphically by a user, or interpreted by software tools to determine the relationships between entities. For example, an asset manager program may access a model describing the hardware and software assets in a corporation to manage the configuration of the assets.
When defining general models and ontologies, the user creates common types of entities and the relationships that connect the entities in the model. When defining leaf entities in the model, the user may want to highlight (e.g., for tooling and applications) specific general relationships that may exist among the entities. Some examples of general relationships are dependency and composition. In existing approaches, the relationships are defined by subtyping an existing relationship entity in the model and specifically restricting the referenced entities as targets within the subtype. With this approach, however, the representation of the model quickly becomes cluttered with numerous subtyped entities that add no semantics (e.g., no change in multiplicity, and no addition of properties or attributes other than to restrict the referenced entity). In addition, both the general and specifically highlighted relationships between the entities must be retained in the model. The existing approaches to declaring relationships among entities in a model result in highly complex, cluttered models that are difficult to interpret and that add no semantics to the model.
Rather than declaring the expected targets in the model, another existing approach is to update each application that interprets models with the information about expected targets of general relationships. With this approach, however, each application has to be updated each time there is a change to the expected targets.